Why exactly do you think wildcard teams have an advantage?

Hello odradek,

I can understand the argument and the frustration, but what happens if we are the ones who win that Wild Card. We’ve nearly done it in both 2000 and 2005 – that could be us who has that disadvantage?

I’m not saying some adjustment couldn’t be made to make it harder for the Wild Card to advance, but at the same time, the Angels did NOT play well in that series. Their offense was virtually nonexistant, mostly because their table-setters and guys who force their actions on the bases did next-to-nothing (only Figgins made his presence felt among those guys), both Santana and Saunders did not have particularly good starts, their bullpen was shaky, as both Shields and K-Rod were erratic, and even their defense, which was supposedly one of the better ones in the league, I believe, faltered and didn’t play well.

Plus, as I mentioned in another thread, they didn’t execute the fundamentals that they normally did during the season very well. The poor baserunning by Guerrero and Hunter (I think) were costly, plus that poor execution by Aybar on the squeeze bunt attempt (personally, I think he tried too hard to conceal it from the Red Sox; if he puts down a half-way decent bunt, combined with Willits’ speed, that run scores fairly easily) helped to doom the Angels. I don’t think the fact that the Red Sox were a better-than-expected Wild Card had THAT much to do with their advancing and the Angels going home. If the Angels had executed as well as they had throughout most of the season, chances are that they would be hosting the Rays for Game 1 of the ALCS on Friday night and the Red Sox would be home right now.

Plus, regarding making it more difficult for the Wild Card to advance, another issue that has to be considered is – is it that fair for a team that is only the Wild Card to be punished for not winning their division, even if they win 95 games like Boston did in a division that was arguably one of the tougher ones in baseball, as compared to giving home-field advantage to the White Sox, who didn’t even win 90 games after playing 163 games to enter the postseason, while arguably playing a weaker division?

If you’re going to make it harder on the Wild Card to advance in the postseason, I think you also have to consider a point Jay or someone else on LGT mentioned some time ago about possibly giving the home-field advantage to the Wild Card team if they have more wins than the division opponent, especially if the division the Wild Card team comes from is collectively stronger than the team the division opponent comes from, and I’m pretty sure that the AL East was stronger than the AL Central this year.

If we can’t address all these issues, then I’d rather leave the playoff format as is – after all, the Angels didn’t play well in many facets of the game, and I think that had as much, if not more, to do with why the Angels are home right now than the Red Sox being a better-than-expected Wild Card.

Just my 2 cents.

I just think the nature of a wildcard team is usually one that:

is very hot during the second half of the season
has over 90 wins
has been playing “playoff baseball” for the entire month of September just to get in

You factor those three things in and I don’t think it’s any surprise that many of them do so well.

So, as it stands, the teams with the best and worst records have each won 2 out of the last 15. You’ll notice that the percentage of wins is almost exactly equal to 1/8 (if the Dodgers don’t win, both will be exactly 1/8), which is what it you would expect if the winner were determined entirely by chance.

It’s a small sample, but it appears that regular season record is completely useless as a predictor of postseason success. This doesn’t strike me as all that surprising, given the ups and downs teams go through during the course of the long season — you would expect record in September, say, to be a better predictor than record overall.

As to whether wild card teams should be at a disadvantage, I think that would be a misplaced “punishment” — after all, as Joe points out, the wild card team may well have a better record than one or possibly even both of the other division winners. If we were going to penalize someone, why not make it the team with the worst record, rather than the wild card team, and change the matchup rules so that the best record faces off against that team, rather than the wild card, in the first round?

Should they have one fewer home date (teams would squawk about lost revenue)?

They already do play one less home date than the higher ranked team.

Also! The Red Sox Runs Scored vs. Runs Allowed: 845-694. Angels: 765-697. So I’m sorry, but who’s the better team going into this matchup? Are we just rewarding the Angels for getting to play Seattle 19 times?

the team with the best record in baseball has won the World Series just twice in the 16 postseasons since baseball creatively went to the wild-card playoff format.

I see what he’s saying. I just don’t care.

The major fault of the playoffs isn’t the wild card, or even the division winner with 85 wins getting into the playoffs.

The problem is the Division Series playoff schedule.

1. It is a best of five. Why? A seven game series would be better, but the powers that be don’t want want a potential Game 7 orf the World Series leaking into November. (Can you imagine us in the World Series last year because we won the LCS 3-1?)

2. In this best of 5 Angels vs Red Sox, the schedule was Wed, Fri, Sun, Mon, Wed. You only need 3 SPs for that round, not 4 (or 3 on short rest). Never during the regular season do you see a seires set up like this.

All of the series should be best of 7, with the format 2-3-2 with one day off between sites. This most closely aligns with the regular season. There are enough channels with sister stations (ESPN, ESPN2; TBS, TNT, etc) that 2 playoff games could be played at the same time, especially in the first round.

It’s not like these playoff games are generating ratings that compare with the NFL anyways. Who is going to care if they are schedules simultaneously? The difference between a 1.4 and 1.1 rating probably wouldn’t make a difference to the advertisers one bit.